Old Oregon
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For The Five Wounds, Four Words
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rite toward the pain. Kirstin Valdez Quade was a graduate student in the creative writing program when Professor Ehud Havazelet offered that advice. Today Quade, MFA ’09 (creative writing), is an award-winning novelist and creative writing professor at Princeton University who is, she says, “profoundly grateful” for the program and Havazelet, who died in 2015. Writing toward the pain, Quade says, doesn’t mean wallowing in misery or writing only bleak stories; rather, it means having the courage to explore characters’ suffering as well as their joys. She delivers with her 2021 debut novel, The Five Wounds, which follows the convergences—sometimes fractious, sometimes funny—of five generations of a New Mexico family and centers on an alcoholic, deadbeat father seeking redemption and his high-spirited teenage daughter who arrives on his doorstep eight months pregnant. The novel is shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2021 First Novel Prize and the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel grew from a short story that was the first Quade workshopped with peers and faculty members in the competitive MFA program, which admits only two percent of applicants. Havazelet was “absolutely critical” to the story’s development and Quade’s own, she says. Large-hearted but exacting, he demanded that each and every word she wrote contribute to the whole. He pushed her to ensure that her characters reckoned with their fears and failures—their humanity. She finished the short story after graduation and within two years had been persuaded by her editor to extend it into a novel. “Ehud really shaped how I think about story and my responsibilities as a writer toward my characters,” Quade says. “It’s advice I pass on to my own students and think about every time I write: what am I avoiding writing about here because it feels difficult? Am I allowing them to be fully human?” —Matt Cooper, Oregon Quarterly
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WINTER 2022
FAWZI ALKADI, BS ’96 (marketing), recently helped launch the Saudi East chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and serves as marketing and communication chair for the peerto-peer network in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. MAKIIA LUCIER, BA ’97 (public relations), was featured in the Nerd Daily, an entertainment blog, regarding her new novel, Year of the Reaper. REID CARR, BA ’98 (journalism: advertising), was elected board chair for Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit investigative news organization. CARLA DAMIANO, PhD ’98 (German), a German professor at Eastern Michigan University, received the Cross
of the Order of Merit, the highest honor available to individuals for service to the Federal Republic of Germany. WENDY BANA, MS ’99 (information science: applied information management), was named head of school for the Willowbrook campus of Anneliese Schools, Laguna Beach, California.
2000s MARISA MACY, MS ’00, PhD ’04 (early intervention), was appointed the Cille and Ron Williams Community Chair for Early Childhood Education at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. ERIN WATKINSON, BA ’00 (Spanish), became vice president of strategic solutions and training for Avetta, a supply chain risk management software company based in Orem, Utah. JENNY BENNETT, BA ’01 (public relations), a longtime Lane County-based
community banker, banking executive, and community leader, was promoted to market president for the Summit Bank in Eugene. ANNA BERRY, BS ’01 (biology), became US technical director for Pelsis and B&G pest control, Jackson, Georgia. BRIAN MALLOY, BA ’01 (Clark Honors College, political science), of the Brandi firm in San Francisco, became certified as an appellate law specialist, was a finalist for California’s 2021 Consumer Attorney of the Year, and was named in Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers in America lists for 2021 and 2022, respectively. JASON MARSHALL, BMus ’01 (music education), was appointed assistant principal at Hart High School, Santa Clarita, California. DIANE TEEMAN, BS ’01, MS ’03 (anthropology), was elected chair of the Burns Paiute Tribe in Burns.
HOLLY ANDRES © 2020
ANNA BINDER, BA ’95 (political science), was appointed to the board of directors for Culture Amp, an employee engagement, performance, and development platform in San Francisco.
